In its earliest incarnation, “Crime Club” (or “The Eno Crime Club,” as it was known from 1931-32, since it was sponsored by Eno’s “effervescent antacid salts”) was one of radio’s most popular half-hours, outdrawing the likes of even “The King of Jazz,” Paul Whiteman, and broadcasters Lowell Thomas and Walter Winchell. The reason for the program’s eventual fade in listenership was described by radio historiographer Fred MacDonald thusly: “Many reasons could be suggested for such a development: the paucity of good writers, the still-maturing art of sound effects, the preference of Americans for drama in motion pictures rather than radio. But the most pressing reason was the lack of big-name talent. Movie personalities avoided radio (and) as a new form of programming, broadcast drama had little experienced talent upon which to draw.”

The Doubleday Publishing Company introduced its series of “Crime Club” imprints in 1928 with Kay Cleaver Strahan’s “The Desert Moon Mystery,” an imprint which earned them a major mint thanks to a long run of dime-store novels that continued to be released until 1991. Among the books featured under the “Crime Club” banner were all fifty novels of “The Saint,” written by Leslie Charteris, and several of the Fu Manchu first editions by Sax Rohmer. The popularity of the novels even stretched to motion pictures, with Universal Studios producing eleven B-mysteries between 1937 and 1939, several of which (“The Westland Case”, “The Lady in the Morgue”) featured Crime Club stalwart Detective Bill Crane (played by Preston Foster), as created by mystery author Jonathan Latimer.

When “The Eno Crime Club” premiered over CBS Radio on February 9, 1931, many of the “Crime Club” imprints were adapted for the six-day-a-week quarter hour series by writers Stewart Sterling and Albert G. Miller. (“The Eno Crime Club” switched to a twice-a-week half-hour format beginning in January 1932, cutting back to a once-weekly appearance in November of that year.) The novels were filtered, however, through a pair of characters created just for the program: Detective Spencer Dean, who was nicknamed “The Manhunter” and played by Edward Reese and later Clyde North, and his sidekick Danny Cassidy, played by Walter Glass and, later, by Jack MacBryde. Other actors to appear on the program included Helen Choate as Jane Elliott, Georgia Backus, Adele Ronson, Brian Donlevy, and Ray Collins. In January 1933, the series switched to the Blue Network and became “Eno Crime Clues,” heard Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 8:00 PM (Tuesdays only beginning September 1934) before calling it quits in June of 1936. (Unlike its predecessor, “Eno Crime Clues” did not rely on adaptations from Doubleday’s pulp novels.)

Ten years later, “Crime Club” made a return appearance on Mutual beginning December 2, 1946 as a half-hour series that once again used the imprints as inspiration but acted more as an anthology series, with only a character dubbed “The Librarian” (played by Barry Thompson and Raymond Edward Johnson) making weekly appearances and telling tales of mystery and adventures with detectives frequently in pursuit of crime suspects. This version, for which most of the extant “Crime Club” episodes have been culled today, lasted only a single sustained season under the direction-production of Roger Bower. This post-war revival, from which all twenty of the episodes contained in this Radio Archives collection have been taken, offers modern day listeners interesting and well-produced tales of mayhem that, even after more than half a century, can still capture the attention of the most sophisticated and discriminating radio enthusiast . In “Crime Club,” in fact, you’ll hear echoes of not only good detective stories, but you’ll also enjoy the influences of other contemporary anthology shows of an era that produced such classics as “Suspense,” “The Whistler,” and “The Mysterious Traveler”.